Nick
On the surface, this is classic Steven King speculative fiction. Much deeper, this is an old man yelling at the clouds for 600 pages.
Everywhere I go, I see praise for this book: the reviews on here, Tik Tok, friends, Twitter, etc. Through the first 30-40% I could totally see that. I got the hype. I could not think about anything other than this book and its premise.
Let's go right to that. If you could change the past, would you? An acquaintance of protagonist Jake asks just that after trying so himself. Owner of the local diner, Al, after seeing Jake recently, realizes he doesn't have long to live and shows his little secret to his pal. A portal? In a diner? Yes, a portal that takes the traveler to an exact date and time in 1958. No matter how long they spend there, they come back with only 2 minutes having passed. Jake first wonders about changing the life of one of his adult GED students with a sad story. He does just so. When he comes back, he realizes that he has changed a lot of things for good and bad. However, Al "urges" Jake to go back and save Kennedy from Oswald and forever change the course of history.
At first, Jake (now going by George Amberson) focuses on changing the trajectory of his student's family's life. He then heads to Dallas to start trailing Oswald and this is where things went totally sideways for me.
The entire tone of the novel shifts. King takes Jake on a journey further away from changing the past and more on a nostalgic run that a guy in his late 30s should not have felt so at home in. There he meets the love of his life yadda yadda yadda. I'm apt to wonder if this wasn't the result of a single story idea but maybe multiple stories stitched together. Sure, Jake still wants to save Kennedy from assassination, but I feel like King's main directive was to wax nostalgic and to kind of rue his own life. In the afterword, he mentions his wife being his harshest critic, and I really would like to be a fly on the wall when she read all about this writer who's changing the past by talking shit about his ex-wife and explicitly fucking the lady he wish he had met in the late 50s. Was there any reason for that?
Somewhere around this point is when I realized I felt like I should have been about 95% done but was only at about 50%. The next like 450 pages or so were completely filled with all of this weird utopian bullshit that made me want to puke. I probably would have DNF'ed if it wasn't for the Oswald stuff still being mentioned. After all, that was the driving force behind the book, right? The climax was well done.
And then it went on and on and on some more...
I'm going to skip a bunch of stuff so I don't spoil, but in the most Kingian fashion ever, a super flimsy explanation is given for how time travel is possible. And then the book goes on and on and on some more... The ending? Oof. If this was the ending his son recommended, I'd hate to read what he'd originally envisioned.
Unfortunately, I am now meandering as much as King did. So, let me finish with this: If the first 1/3 of this book was a nice, fresh glass of ginger ale, the last 2/3 of the book would be the 3 remaining bubbles of a flat soda.
On the surface, this is classic Steven King speculative fiction. Much deeper, this is an old man yelling at the clouds for 600 pages.
Everywhere I go, I see praise for this book: the reviews on here, Tik Tok, friends, Twitter, etc. Through the first 30-40% I could totally see that. I got the hype. I could not think about anything other than this book and its premise.
Let's go right to that. If you could change the past, would you? An acquaintance of protagonist Jake asks just that after trying so himself. Owner of the local diner, Al, after seeing Jake recently, realizes he doesn't have long to live and shows his little secret to his pal. A portal? In a diner? Yes, a portal that takes the traveler to an exact date and time in 1958. No matter how long they spend there, they come back with only 2 minutes having passed. Jake first wonders about changing the life of one of his adult GED students with a sad story. He does just so. When he comes back, he realizes that he has changed a lot of things for good and bad. However, Al "urges" Jake to go back and save Kennedy from Oswald and forever change the course of history.
At first, Jake (now going by George Amberson) focuses on changing the trajectory of his student's family's life. He then heads to Dallas to start trailing Oswald and this is where things went totally sideways for me.
The entire tone of the novel shifts. King takes Jake on a journey further away from changing the past and more on a nostalgic run that a guy in his late 30s should not have felt so at home in. There he meets the love of his life yadda yadda yadda. I'm apt to wonder if this wasn't the result of a single story idea but maybe multiple stories stitched together. Sure, Jake still wants to save Kennedy from assassination, but I feel like King's main directive was to wax nostalgic and to kind of rue his own life. In the afterword, he mentions his wife being his harshest critic, and I really would like to be a fly on the wall when she read all about this writer who's changing the past by talking shit about his ex-wife and explicitly fucking the lady he wish he had met in the late 50s. Was there any reason for that?
Somewhere around this point is when I realized I felt like I should have been about 95% done but was only at about 50%. The next like 450 pages or so were completely filled with all of this weird utopian bullshit that made me want to puke. I probably would have DNF'ed if it wasn't for the Oswald stuff still being mentioned. After all, that was the driving force behind the book, right? The climax was well done.
And then it went on and on and on some more...
I'm going to skip a bunch of stuff so I don't spoil, but in the most Kingian fashion ever, a super flimsy explanation is given for how time travel is possible. And then the book goes on and on and on some more... The ending? Oof. If this was the ending his son recommended, I'd hate to read what he'd originally envisioned.
Unfortunately, I am now meandering as much as King did. So, let me finish with this: If the first 1/3 of this book was a nice, fresh glass of ginger ale, the last 2/3 of the book would be the 3 remaining bubbles of a flat soda.